It’s not often I get the chance to speak with a renowned animal behaviorist, much less for a talk about nutrition and nourishment, but my guest today, Fred Provenza, professor emeritus at Utah State University, makes the argument that we can learn a lot about our own health by observing the way that animals choose their food in their natural environments. Fred challenges us to be more skeptical of the latest diets and academic findings on nutrition and listen more to our own bodies and how they respond to the food we ingest.

In this interview, Fred explains how his observations of seemingly counterintuitive eating behavior in goats first compelled him to look deeper into the nutritional wisdom of animals and how his findings gave him valuable insights into how we can begin to rediscover our own nutritional wisdom on a personal basis. We also talk about how someone (like myself), who is coming from a place of chronic digestive issues, can rebuild their system to the point that we can trust the signals that our body is giving us once again. Now before I give too much away, I’ll turn things over to Fred